


a tragedy comes in five parts

by orphan_account



Category: Chernobyl (TV 2019)
Genre: Angst, Drama, M/M, Romance, Soviet Union, Suicide, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-17
Updated: 2019-06-17
Packaged: 2020-05-13 17:13:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19255600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Valery Legasov and Boris Shcherbina and the things that damned them.“Boris,” Valery asks. “Do you ever think about dying?”





	a tragedy comes in five parts

**Author's Note:**

> *waves* I am aware that Chernobyl fic can be considered Problematic. This is purely for the characters of the show.

 

_I._

Boris Shcherbina does not suffer fools gladly. When he sees the second helicopter crash, he is relieved Valery Legasov is not a fool, even if he is starting to think he is honest enough to be one.

 

_II._

The hospital room is stripped white and silent- aren’t hospital rooms supposed to have beeps and monitors? Perhaps that is just a myth from the Western World he is not meant to know about.

Maybe he’s just gone deaf.

Boris laughs and it turns into wracked, bloody coughs and even when the fit stops he tastes the blood in his mouth and- he wonders- is it anything like the blood on his hands? Is a responsible man any less so for bleeding the same colour as those he has killed?

His life is all questions and no answers and Valery is not even here to tell him what the scientific word would be for unbalanced equations, or if six thousand tons of lies would hide how his body is rotting inside out.

Boris Shcherbina has been a party man for over fifty years and his reward is a private room as he lays dying.

 

_III._

“Boris,” Valery asked, eye bright with the fever that’d been burning him for two days. “Do you ever think about dying?”

“No,” he replied eventually, crushing out his cigarette in the ashtray on the bedside table and settling back against the headboard, looking askance at the tiny professor curled along his side. “We are already dying.”

“Mm,” he stretched. And he shouldn’t have been attractive, pale as the snow of Siberia and the flush on his cheeks scratched into his skin and the memory that they’re dying and Valery had taken another leap towards it inextricable from the man himself. “But that’s just _dying_. Comrade Charkov and Mother Russia does that to us, don’t you ever want to do something?”

The last words were cut short, victims of a wheezing cough. Boris’ hand hovered uncertainly over his shoulder in case of- what? It was not as if he could reach inside and unravel the miles and miles of contaminated DNA, wasn’t as if it would do any good if he could. He was angry, Boris realised, the burning feeling in the pit of his stomach not the radiation heknew they were drenched in but his old anger. He was anger because Valery was talking about control and Boris wanted that more than anything.

“If I left the dosimeter off, d’you think there’d be any way for them to calculate how much exposure I’d had?”

“What are you talking about, Valera?”

He turned over onto his back, eyes big and looking past Boris’ head to a point on the hotel wall. They had two days before Valery had to stand up in front of a conference of all their enemies and lie and he was going to be better for the conference and if Boris was here instead of in his own room, that was because he had to ensure Valery in his feverish state did not spill state secrets to the room service.

It had everything to do with Valery. It saved the KGB bugging the room. His chest hurt and he could not decide if he was angry because he was beyond suspicion and what that showed about him or because they had stopped seeing him as a threat.If he stopped feeling angry, he didn’t think he would feel anything. He could never stay angry with Valery.

The professor sighed and shifted, pulling away from the puddle of warmth between them and throwing his arms out. He had been veering wildly between too-cold and too-hot for 36 hours and damn their delegation for seeing him as nothing but the naïve idiot, damn Valery for the part of him that was the naïve idiot, damn Boris for loving him.

“Why don’t you try to sleep?” he suggested. Fifty years as a party man did not give him any skills as a nursemaid.

“I don’t want to sleep.” He actually _pouted_. “I have stupid dreams. Taya clawed the listening devices out of the walls of my apartment and I took the broken pieces to the man in the car outside and apologised.”

Boris laughed. “Valery,” he murmured when he finally stopped. “That is the smartest dream you have ever had.” 

He snorted, then coughed again and when it was over he squirmed away slightly and stretched his arms out on either side, trying to reach the edges of the mattress. He achieved his goal; the Soviet Union did not pay for king-sized hotel rooms. Somewhere hidden deep within him, almost as deep as the radiation in his bones, Boris could remember his mother telling him the story of Jesus Christ before the Soviet Union existed. He could not remember a time before the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union would continue long after him- _that_ was the goal of a party man.

He did not want Valery to come back to life. He was not sure he loved his mother. He was not sure who he was if not the Soviet Union. 

“Don’t tease me,” the smile this time was vacant, soft and languid and melting across his face in a way it never would were he well. “Else I’ll punish you in bed later.”

“We are in bed,” he pointed out very seriously. “Why not punish me now?”

“I’m tired,” came the reply and Boris laughed again. A pout, a weak hand hit his elbow and fell back to curl around his waist and hold him tight. “Don’t laugh! I’m thinking about important, clever things.”

“Like what?”

“The Russian Reversal.”

Boris tilted his head, “The what?” He was thinking about how different Valery looked, safe and no cigarette in sight, refusing to kiss one another because Boris does not want to catch what he has when they have to go straight from the conference to the plane.

“A joke,” the hand not wrapped around Boris’ waist floated lazily through the air and he watched it, in a trance and eyes cloudy. “You ever heard of it?”

“No.” And he wondered how Valery had, when his instincts were on red alert that this was a discussion they wouldn’t be having in a bugged room.

“No? Like… in America, you can say ‘fuck the state’. In Communist Russia, the state fucks you.”

Boris couldn’t help but laugh. He didn’t mean to, but that _was_ funny. It would be surprising that Valery Legasov knows about such jokes but not-surprising, like the way he held his drink better than expected for a timid professor or how he saw several men naked before he saw Boris. Valery surprised him when the pilot obeyed and Boris had been in a tail spin ever since. “What other jokes do you know?”

“In America, you can always find a party. In Soviet Russia, party always finds you.”

It goes on in that way for quite some time.

In America, everyone watches television. In the old country, television watches you.

In the Soviet Union, people sometimes rob banks. In capitalist America, bank robs you.

_Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it’s the other way around._

Boris changed the subject.

The fever lived with the sun, and broke at sunset. Valery blinked up at him from the ball he had curled himself into. Boris knew he ought to report this to the delegation, move to the chair beside the bed, go back to his own room tonight. Boris did not move.

“Mm, that’s what I like about you, Borya,” though he was well enough for the conference he was not thinking clearly. “You do not move.”

Without thinking he said; “Neither do you.”

“I am nothing to move,” Valery was not thinking either, he knew and that was why he let it go.

 

_IV._

“Valera,” he said before they left the hotel and went back to report to the Kremlin the success of Vienna.

“Mm?” Valery was his cluttered, untidy self again; chain-smoking and scattered. Unfortunately for him, the KGB would not return his glasses if he forgot them.

Perhaps they would just to scare him with his influence.

Hmm, if they were clever they would give his glasses to _Boris_.

 _A man does not need to be clever to be dangerous_ , Boris reminded himself, wondering where the sense of his past fifty years had gone.

“Did you leave your dosimeter behind at Pripyat?”

“ _Ofcourse not_ , Borya. How stupid do you think I am?”

“And- you did not mean anything when you talked of dying?”

Valery actually laughed, “We are already dying and I am not impatient. Would you worry over things I said after half a bottle of vodka?”

He would, but only because he knew Valery would not actually be as drunk as thought after half a bottle of vodka. The point still stood. He let it go and pulled Valery close to him, resting his chin on his shoulder and breathing in his scent- the woman reapplying lipstick on the bench below the window would probably see them.

If the KGB deserved its reputation, she already knew about them.

A member of their delegation knocked on the door, “Comrade Legasov? It is time to go.”

Boris held him tighter even as the man knocked again, hating the part of himself that was doing this in defiance of the wolf at the door. Valery understood and kissed him.

 

_V._

The life of plutonium-239 is 24,000 years. The life of Valery Legasov is minus two. Perhaps he should just be buried with the eulogy: _Not in Boris’ lifetime_.

Boris does not know if it is more tragic for the fact it was inevitable. (Is he talking about Valery, or Chernobyl?) Maybe because he acted- they all acted- as if it were, so it became. The self-fulfilling prophecy twisted to the grotesque. He thinks of Valery, Pripyat, Comrade Gorbachev, Ulana, moon robots and five thousand tons of sand and boron and the red on his handkerchief he sometimes pretends is just flowers embroidered onto the fabric.

If one man is being threatened by the KGB, is that man still complicit?

He wants whatever answer will allow him to go back in time and save Valery Legasov, because the bastards did not even let him go to the funeral and it was not _,_ it was _not_ , because he is dying.

When a man has been in the party for fifty years, he knows what it is a fuck you.

Boris Shcherbina ends his career in a hospital bed, the room empty but him. He closes his eyes and looks for Valery. Death is cold and dark and no one reaches out to cup his cheek.

 

_0._

Valery Legasov stands on a chair and hangs a rope from the ceiling. His hand shakes and the rope tightens-

 

 

 


End file.
